Life re-begins at 40. At Cannes this year there was dancing on the
streets, the beaches, the screens, the roofs, the clouds. There were
fireworks on the Croisette. And there was a giant mural of the Lumiere Brothers – cinema’s founders – at the railway station
to greet guests arriving by cheval de fer.
The mural’s multi-part design included the famous screen image of a train
that swooped out at audiences in 1895, causing screams at the world’s first
public movie show. That moment was an earnest of wonders to come from a
medium determined to reach out and touch. We have been screaming, weeping,
sobbing and cheering ever since.

Midlife crisis? What crisis? At Cannes 2008, we seemed to be
celebrating a new birth or rebirth. We were certainly feting an anniversary.
Not 1895 but 1968. That was the last major nativity – or re-nativity – for
this bash. The waters broke that year in early summer. Sweeping down from
Paris like a tidal bore, les evenement de Mai flooded
the Croisette, halted screenings, encouraged Godard
and Truffaut to fling themselves at the throats of
the establishment, and had Louis Malle and others
hanging onto the curtain in the main palais
to stop the show going on.

And they did. Cannes shut down. These rebels with a cause wanted a new
festival and got it. The Cote du Cinema closed for
a year of ideological maintenance. The following year Cannes had the new Quinzaine des Realisateurs –
Directors Fortnight – which didn’t just present a counter-event to the
competition, it re-energised the competition itself. Today that event lobs
new directors into the limelight and provides its own official sideshow – ‘Un
Certain Regard’ – as a vital overflow for invited talent. The Directors
Fortnight, responding, has dug ever deeper into the new and unexplored. In
sum: there’s something for everyone, in the name of novelty and excitement,
and sometimes too much for anyone, without 25 hours in his or her day.

Magnifique.

To reaffirm this junket’s refusal to stand still, there were two
‘firsts’ in the main competition: whole new spins of the colour wheel that is
cinema. AriFolman’s
WALTZ WITH BASHIR from Israel gives us an investigative documentary as
animated feature, an experiment with hallucination and expressionism in the
realm of nonfiction. And Jia
Zhang-ke’s 24 CITY, from China, freely but artfully
blends real interviews with scripted-and-acted monologues in a movie shaped
as a documentary history.

What is truth and what is invention, these films ask? Or at a certain
pitch of authenticity are they the same thing?

Jia’s
subject and setting are a giant aeronautics factory in Chengdu,
Sichuan, now closing to make way for a giant housing estate. What do this
Behemoth’s death throes tell us about China’s social and industrial history –
and about the country’s own rebirth? Filming in crystal-sharp HDV, the
director whose best films have peered into China’s soul with a unique combo
of political illumination and human psycho-surgery (PLATFORM, STILL LIFE)
again finds the beating heart and mind of his subject.

The forbidding history of Maoism is remembered by these factory folk:
the work drives, the rallying songs, the displacements, the diasporas. (Many
people were shipped to Chengdu from Shanghai or
further to fill the employment rosters). Meanwhile they look to China’s
shining future with an uncertain dazzlement.
Between the montages of demolition or denuding – the bulldozers and
earth-movers, the monster machines of the old plant being unhoused
beneath their roofless hangars – the human beings talk, one by one or two by
two, to the camera.

Mostly these workers or ex-workers are real. But on four remarkable
occasions they are played by actors. There are scripted monologues for three
women, in each of which imagined life-memories are pushed to the point of
tears. Work and love – the life of the state and the life of the heart –
conflict and intersect in their recall. In one imbroglio of ironies, which Jia surely constructed to challenge the frail frontiers
between art and actuality, the veteran Chinese star Joan Chen (of THE LAST
EMPEROR) plays a factory girl who was once nicknamed ‘Little Flower’ for her
resemblance to a heroine in a famous Chinese movie. The heroine in that movie
was played by – Joan Chen.

The real workers are just as riveting. Sometimes they unparcel entire lives or family stories or philosophies
of work or nationhood. Sometimes they are just caught in frozen candid poses,
human beings startled into spontaneity by the glare of camera lights. In an
unforgettable two-shot, a young worker and his mate, the arm of one round the
neck of the other while the playful thumb of the first fondly flicks the face
of the second, stare at the camera with a gauche, bright happiness. Either
they are gay lovers – in a nation that denies gayness – or they are yuppies
for communism in love with the dream that never dies.

Some dreams don’t. It is their tragedy and their triumph. The dream of
Jewish sovereignty in the vexed homeland of Israel? Not content with novelty
of form – an animated documentary – filmmaker AriFolman creates in WALTZ WITH BASHIR a near-first in
ideological content. This is an anti-Israeli film from Israel. More exactly
it digs deep into a forgotten or repressed past – whose reconstitution is the
purpose and process of the movie – to unearth a military outrage from the
early 1980s. When the first Lebanese war climaxed in a massacre of
Palestinian men, women and children at the Sabra
and Shattila refugee camps, Christian Phalangists avenging the death of their ruler, President Bashir, were blamed. But Israel, far from guiltless,
stood by and connived. Its army sent flares into the night sky to aid the
slaughter.

Folman
adopts a classic movie structure, sanctified as praxis ever since CITIZEN
KANE. The piecing together of the jigsaw. The director himself fought in the
war and is haunted by remnant nightmares. These expressionist sequences alone
– ghostly, naked corpse-soldiers emerging from a midnight sea – justify the
choice of graphic art over live action. But even the hard reportage – the
modern-day interviews and the montage’d war footage
– gain eerie power from the Munch-like visuals. Folman
didn’t rotoscope filmed actors or actions in the
style of Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE or A
SCANNER DARKLY. But WALTZ WITH BASHIR, painted from scratch, has the same air
of distraught and spectral lifelikeness. And the same hypnotic power.

Renewal isn’t always so dramatic in cinema, even at Cannes. Many a
director insists on dancing on the head of the same pin, over and over. All
he asks of audiences and critics is to watch him through a magnifying glass,
so the subtle differences of Terpsichore are discerned and decoded. What looks
the same may not quite be so.

So is Arnaud Despleschin, a favourite French
son at Cannes and kindred fests (SEXUAL LIFE, KINGS AND QUEEN), just doing
another multi-character psychotherapy gig in A CHRISTMAS TALE? Or is the rich
froth of self-examination and self-discovery that textures his cinema given a
new dynastic whisk?A top cast –
Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric,
Emmanuelle Devos – peoples this Yuletide reunion,
as unseasonal torments (life-endangering illness,
traumatic memories, family feuds) ironise the
December gaiety. Honesties shower down like snowfall on people grateful for
the benediction of candour even as they flinch at the shock of the true.

And what of fellow French director Laurent Cantet?
Is he merely applying the probe of his dapper realism (HUMAN RESOURCES, TIME
OUT) to another part of the body existential. Oui
et non. ENTRE LES MURS is
fly-on-the-wall filmmaking, but what a fly and what a wall. Or set of walls.
As we gawp at this tale of pain and pedagogy in the compression chamber of a
mixed-race French school, Cantet’s style of
fiction/verite is unflinching – and spellbinding.

He has torn the pages from a source memoir by teacher Francois Begadeau and turned them into living cinema. Begadeau co-wrote the script with Cantet
and the film’s editor Robin Campillo. Begadeau also plays the teacher hero: alias, himself.
Real teachers and schoolchildren fill out the other roles, in a movie that
was workshopped by the cast and crew to a pitch of
often hairraising realism.

And what of three auteurs without whom the
Cannes Film Festival would surely be the Can’t Film Festival? Who can imagine
this Cote d’Azur event in the 21st century
without the Dardenne brothers (two-time Golden Palm
winners), or Nuri Bilge Ceylan
(the not-so-young Turk who seized Special Jury Prize with DISTANT and
followed up with CLIMATES) or Monsieur Clint Eastwood, rumoured in the
pre-festival to be back with a mystery relative of MYSTIC RIVER.

This year’s Dardenne endowment was LORNA’S
SILENCE, another icy slice of moral quandary and existential pain acted by a
tingling newcomer (Kosovo actress Arts Dobroshi as
an Albanian girl imperilling herself with a paper marriage), helped by an old
hand of the Belgian Brothers acting troupe (JeremieRenier, tremendous as a wasted junkie clinging to
life).

Nuri
Bilge Ceylan offered THREE MONKEYS. We assume the
title denotes the old triplets – see, hear and speak no evil – but maybe it
means the three human primates who caper and go ‘hoo-hoo’
around that old devil playground called Love. The corrupt politician; the
politician’s driver, bribed to take the rap for a hit-and-run killing by the
boss; the driver’s wife, bribed to bed the boss while hubby’s in the hoochow. It ends in tears while Turkey – messages the
director – is increasingly in tiers: a nation stratified by deadly divisions
of class, wealth, envy and exploitative ascendancies. Dog eats dog. Or monkey
monkey,

And then there was Clint. Those red steps rearing to heaven at the
business end of Cannes – what would they be without the annual
hand-wave from Hollywood’s great grandee? Old Whisper Voice was back, greyer
and taller and squinting down into the flashbulbs. While DIRTY HARRY (revived
on the public beach) re-showed us the young Clint, a shock-quiffed heartthrob settling hoodlums’ hash in 1971 LA,
director Clint’s new CHANGELING, released in 2008, is set in 1928.

How’s that for a triangulation of time? You needn’t call the film a
masterpiece, this truth-based tale of kidnapping and corruption in old Los
Angeles, to admire the gravitas Eastwood now brings to potentially purple
plotlines. God knows it could have been over-the-top. Angelina Jolie plugs her tear-ducts into LA’s mains water supply.
She plays the distraught mother whose vanished son is returned months after
an abduction. But the kid delivered isn’t, she insists, her child. Police and
courts cry “Nonsense!” They bung her in the booby hatch. But the evidence
grows, the pedophile is captured and radio priest
John Malkovich is winning his war of words with the
LAPD.

The asylum scenes are hootenanny and then some: imagine SHOCK CORRIDOR
merged with THE SNAKE PIT. Then there are Malkovich’s
blond wig and moustache. These belong in a novelty shop while his creepy
rolling-stock delivery seems anachronistic – and actorish
– in the tableau style of Clint’s visuals, each perspective framed, composed
and almost handtinted. The French loved the film,
of course. Anything that looks as if it could have been made in Hollywood 50
years ago – by Sirk, Minnelli or God – gets their
juices going. Some bet-makers at Cannes put 100 Euros instantly on Jolie for Best Actress; others didn’t. (“I am shocked to
hear that gambling is going at this festival…..oh, my winnings, thank you”).

The other American magnum opus was Steven Soderbergh’s
CHE. This was so big it was two films, lasting a total of 4 ½ hours. We who
lived to tell the tales – filing our piping copy about a first movie that
covers the Cuban invasion and a second that narrates Che’s
last months as a revolution-maker in Bolivia – did so thanks to a ‘Che’ dinner bag given each of us at the interval. This
contained a ham sandwich, a chocolate bar and a bottle of Contrex
mineral water: the guerrilla warrior’s essential survival kit at Cannes. (A
special blessing to the Contrex water people this
year).

Benicio
del Toro as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara bestrides the
diptych like a Colossus, though it is quite a straddle. Some of us feared he
would be Herniated Ernie by the end. Soderbergh
hops between time zones in part one, using soundbites
from Che’s 1964 visit to the United Nations in New
York to cerebrate the jungle warfare. Part two – much stronger – throws
political pensees to the wind. It is a chase movie,
but by god what a chase movie. (This sentence can be hired out to posters).
The jungles are leeched of the hot colours used in movie one. Sinisterly
paler, they are a silvery sepulchre for the hot dreams and tropic utopias that
burgeoned in the march on Havana. Here everything bleaches to an endgame, as Che and his dwindling band struggle through rivers,
ravines and rainforests to the last rendezvous with history-shaping death –
their own.

Soderbergh,
said many, will have to shape this marathon into multiplex-friendly form. Elsewise it will end up on TV, a megaseries
condemned to the gaze of sofa potatoes; or else in one of those all-night arthouses watched by four anoraks and a dog. Then again
(say I), why not leave a humungous folly alone? At least there is DVD; at
least there is and will be the download market. Those have their quenchless
acolytes. Thosepeopledon’t care about length or
unwieldiness. Both time’s mighty jumps and time’s marathon continuances are
software for the starving cinephile. Take your hand
off my iPod.

We sometimes escaped the viewing cells at Cannes to discover there was
a real world outside. Here on the Croisette the sun blazed down, hitting everyone
with a solar-powered mallet. Here brioche and burger kiosks stood shimmering
in the baking heat. Here crowds poured down the promenade towards the
hot-ticket screening of INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.
Here my picture was constantly being taken, as I walked along, by paparazzi
mistaking me for Brad Pitt. Here PR persons come up to press on one the
latest invitation to a new film from Papua or Patagonia, to an Estonian
stoner party, to a séance with Siegfried Kracauer
(dead but loving it) or to a film called NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD. Actual
title, actual film. Horror with zombie poultry: you have to love the people
at Troma.

Showing on the fringe were sensible movies too. More of Terence
Davies’s OF TIME AND THE CITY and Raymond Depardon’s
LA VIE MODERNE, standout works of revelation and reflection, in another
American Cinema Papers cyberzone. But let us
salute, from the Un Certain Regard sideshow, Bent Hamer’s
O’HORTEN and C’EST DUR D’ETRE AIME PAR LES CONS by David Qesemand,
Xavier Liberman and Thomas Rich. One film is
fiction, one fact. But both show, in diametric ways, that fortune favours the
forward-gazing.

It may be a retired train driver in Norway who finds the ‘super’ in
superannuation, or the put-on-trial editor and staff of a French satirical
magazine which published Danish and French cartoons spoofing Mohammed and got
away with it in a country that respects freedom, art, wit and the right to
say ‘ya boo’ to divinities of all denominations.

This documentary is a lovely thing. It doesn’t just show the
doodles that drew fundamentalists’ wrath. (My favourite is the one in which
Allah holds up a hand to freshly-smoking terrorists arriving at Heaven’s gate
and says, “Stop! We’ve run out of virgins”). It interviews everyone concerned,
condenses the epoch-making trial into cogent soundbites,
and reports the turning-point euphoria of the defendants when they received a
letter of support from no less than Nicholas Sarkozy.

Bent Hamer made the sweetest comedy at
Cannes. O’HORTEN has an irresistible eponymous hero, a pipe-smoking railway
retiree, gnomic and laconic while also tweedy and upstanding. In a Walter Pidgeonlookalike contest he
would beat all comers, including Walter Pidgeon. He
preserves his unflappability – just about – as his first days of leisure are
assailed by episodes of inadvertent crime, dognapping
and the brief friendship of a mad inventor who likes driving blindfolded
through Oslo. As a side-note, the frequency of distant train whistles in the
film, nostalgically reawakening the hero’s past, make the US/UK title surely
inevitable. O’HORTEN HEARS A ‘WHOO!’

Neither film, as it happened, won the best prize in Un Certain Regard.
(At Cannes even notionally non-competitive sideshows end up with bauble
ceremonies). This event’s mini-jury picked TULPAN from Kazakhstan, in a
gesture some saw as a riposte to BORAT. As if to say, “there is more to this
primitive but characterful Asian country than
bullying patriarchal men, downtrodden women and obsessive bonding with
animals”, here is a film about – well, all right, bullying patriarchs,
downtrodden women and obsessively bonded-with animals.

But what fun. What colour. What humanity. The young uncle back from
the navy woos the daughter of a nearby farming family. (“Nearby” in the
steppes can mean 100 miles). The girl says he has big ears and won’t accept
him. The uncle’s family come back with a photo of Prince Charles cut out from
a newspaper. “Look, big ears are princely.” “Who is he? Is he an African
prince?” “No, American.”

If you resist this, you surely cannot resist the mile-high ‘twisters’,
egg-whisking across the flatlands; or the sight-for-sore-eyes jalopy driven
by the local postman/delivery boy, a majestic boneshaker hung with tattered
nude pinups and multicoloured gewgaws; or the scene of an angrily honking
camel pursuing a hapless itinerant vet as he tries to take her baby into
care; or the gasp-inducing sequence of a lamb’s birth, complete with attempts
at a kiss of life by the hero and his brother. (“You first,” “No, you
first”). The movie has the vastness and variety of Mikhalkov’s
URGA, combined with the comic acuity of a GOOD SAILOR SCHWEIK.

Out in the Directors Fortnight there were standout films from a dozen
countries. My pick was Romania’s BOOGIE: sharp, sombre and perfect in its
tale of a holidaying couple, plus kid, whose seaside idyll is wrecked when
the husband meets old schoolchums and decides that
one night of beer and whoring won’t upset the missus. Oh but it will, Boogie,
it will. Romania, which won last year’s Golden Palm with 4 MONTHS, 3
WEEKS,2 DAYS, seems incapable of
producing bad cinema. Here the performances are frighteningly real. Likewise
the sense of a small straying that turns, by the doomed increments of a dirigiste destiny, into fatal schism.

Cometh the hour, cometh the Palms. Sean Penn herded his team onto the
stage of the Salle Lumiere and announced that the
2008 winner of the Cannes gilded frond was – Laurent Cantet’s
ENTRE LES MURS.

Millions of French persons jumped in the air simultaneously all across
the world.This is the first time Gaul
had won gold since 1987, when Cannes triumph was clouded by an unpopular
choice Director Maurice Pialat, you recall,
laurelled for the loathed-by-many SOUS LE SOLEIL DU SATAN, waved his Palm at
a booing audience and said “You don’t like me, well, I don’t like you!”

Quite different here. Cantet and his film
were adored.The rafters rang. Those
who were percussing enthusiastic palms also like
the Best Actor prize:Benicio del Toro in CHE.Best Actress went to Brazil newcomer Sandra Corveloni,
playing a feisty slum-dweller in Walter Salles’s
LINHA DE PASSE.Italy’s GOMORRA, a
lumbering drama about the Camorra, got runner-up Special Jury Prize.But Nuri Bilge Ceylan (THREE MONKEYS) and the Dardenne
Bros (LORNA’S SILENCE) grabbed deserving gongs for Best Director and Best
Screenplay respectively.

As for the most important prize of all, the Palme
Dog, that annual recognition of the best canine performance, it went to
mongrel pooch Lucy in Kelly Reichardt’s WENDY AND
LUCY, a girl-and-dog odyssey to Alaska.

The runner-up was Molly the mongrel, so memorable and affecting in
Bent Hamer’s O’HORTEN.Lucy was away working on another film, so
unable to collect her award.But Molly
strode to the stage, took her award and unfurled her carefully prepared
speech:

“Woof!...”

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.